CHAPTER TWELVE
The television had been on for most of the morning, but she could not have said what was playing.
She sat with her laptop open on the coffee table, her legs tucked beneath her on the couch.
The blue light of the laptop screen is the brightest thing in the room.
The Fresh Horizons forum was on the screen, clean and welcoming, with its little banner at the top that read Your journey continues here!
She had read that line so many times it had stopped meaning anything. It was pretty cheesy, to be honest.
She scrolled down through the latest posts.
You look AMAZING.
So proud of you.
This is everything.
She read each one, rolling her eyes.
Below that particular post, there was a post from a woman she recognized from the Thursday evening group.
She had sat across from her for six weeks and listened to her cry about her ex-husband's infidelity and the years she had lost to him. Now she was announcing that she had accepted a new job, a senior position at a firm in the city. She’d be moving into her own apartment next month for the first time in her adult life.
She had attached a photograph of herself at what appeared to be a celebratory dinner, surrounded by friends, with a glass of wine raised toward the camera.
Can't believe how far I've come, the post read. A year ago, I couldn't get out of bed. Now look.
She looked… in fact, she stared at the photograph for a long time.
The woman's face was bright and open and completely at ease.
Seeing it, something rose in her chest that she had stopped calling jealousy—because jealousy was too small a word for it.
Jealousy was wanting what someone else had.
But this was different. This was the feeling of watching other runners cross the finish lines while she stood at the starting blocks with both feet nailed to the ground.
She had done the program. She had sat in the circle and done the exercises and filled out the worksheets and said the things she was supposed to say.
She had made her list of goals. She had identified her patterns and her triggers and her core beliefs.
She’d done all of it, every piece of that tired bullshit. She had done everything they asked.
And she was still here. Still in this apartment with its secondhand furniture and its view of a parking structure and pot-smoking neighbors who made sure the entire exterior of the place smelled like weed.
She was still waking up at three in the morning with her heart going and the dark pressing in from every corner of the room.
She closed the laptop. The television murmured something behind her and she reached over without looking and turned it off. The room went quiet. She sat in it for a moment and let her breathing even out, and she thought about Carol.
Carol hadn’t seen her coming. That was the part that stayed with her most clearly, sharper than anything else from that night.
The way Carol had called out toward the kitchen, her voice light and relaxed, expecting her friend Deb.
The way the wine glass had simply fallen from her hand when she turned and saw who was actually standing there.
There hadn’t been time for her to be afraid, not really, and that had been almost considerate.
The knife had gone in easier than she had expected.
That had surprised her, the first time. She had anticipated resistance, some physical argument from the body, but there had been very little.
Two quick movements, and then the third at the throat to be certain, and then it was done.
And the strangest thing—the thing she had turned over many times since—was the quiet that had come over her in that moment. Not panic, not revulsion.
Quiet. A settling, like a room after a window has been closed against the wind. She had stood there for a few seconds in Carol's living room with that stillness running all the way through her. For the first time in longer than she could remember, she had felt entirely calm.
Donna had been the same. Easier, even, because she had known by then what to expect.
She had followed her home at a distance and waited, and when the back door gave way she had moved through the dark kitchen with complete steadiness.
Donna had been sitting on the couch with a glass of water, still dressed from her date.
She had looked up and there had been one second, just one, where her face had arranged itself into pure confusion before everything else arrived.
It had been quick, and it had been quiet.
Afterward, standing outside in the cold air, she had felt it again. That deep, almost medicinal calm. It was almost like something had been lanced.
She understood now that it was the only thing that worked.
She had tried everything else. The program, the therapy, the gratitude journal she had kept for four months before throwing it across the room one morning.
There were the friendships she had tried to rebuild and the dates she had gone on, and there had been the new routines she had constructed like scaffolding around a building that had fallen down long ago.
But one of it had touched the thing that lived in her chest. None of it had moved the needle even slightly.
Ah, but this did.
She reached for her laptop and opened it again.
The forum reloaded. SunflowerMom52 on her beach.
The woman from Thursday group at her celebratory dinner.
She scrolled further and found two more recent posts, both of them made of the same nonsense.
Another milestone. Another woman stepping into her life with both hands open.
She read them both carefully.
She was not impulsive. That was important.
She had learned that about herself over the past few months, learned it the way you rediscover about yourself, some vague fact that you’d known earlier and life and had nearly forgotten.
She didn’t act on the heat of the feeling.
She let it cool into something harder and more useful. And then she made a plan.
She looked at the screen and she began to do exactly that.